Some little known anarchists: James Harrigan

The subject of this sketch was a cockney of the working class. A
shoemaker who tramped the country making and repairing boots and shoes,
varying his occupation by hawking different articles. He held meetings
in the provincial towns which he visited during his travels, never
looking for any assistance in his propaganda work. All he wanted was a
crowd, and with his strong voice, and ready wit, he always held their
attention. He was a member of the first “International”, and opposed
the “arm-chair” revolutionaries of those days, as he did later on in
the “Eighties”. He probably earned the proud distinction of being the
first open-air propagandist of avowed Anarchism in England. When H.
Seymour was publishing the first English anarchist paper, Harrigan was
selling it at his meetings in the parks, besides occasionally
contributing to its columns. The “Anarchist” after a fluttering
existence, during which it changed from Anarchist-Communism to
Anarchist-Individualism died on the advent of “Freedom”.

Harrigan, like Chatterton, has been described in a novel which
Olive [Helen and Olivia] Rossetti wrote under the nom-de-plume of Helen
Meredith: “A Girl Among the Anarchists”. She gives us a picture which
is, on the whole, a truthful one. “He was a very small man, certainly
not more than five feet high, thin and wiry, with gray hair and
moustache, but otherwise clean-shaven. His features were unusually
expressive and mobile, from his some-what scornful mouth to his
deep-set observant eyes, and clearly denoted the absence of the Stolid
Saxon strain in his blood. His accent, too, though not that of an
educated man, was free from the cockney twang. His dress was spare as
his figure, but though well-worn there was something spruce and trim
about his whole demeanour, which indicated that he was not totally
indifferent to the impression he created on others.”

Harrigan’s propaganda work was done in what has justly been
called “The heroic period of Anarchism”, when the names of Emile Henri
[Henry], Ravachol, and Sante Caserio were on the lips of every-one, and
Anarchists were regarded as bomb-throwers and assassins. Hostile
audiences were often met with, yet he could gain their sympathy without
compromising his position, invariably explaining that, in his view, the
violence of some Anarchists was a natural reflex of the violence and
tyranny of governments.

Propagandists such as Harrigan, work away at the street
corners, and in the parks, known only to a few, and leave a memory only
among those who were their intimates. But who can measure their
influence on their time, or tell what waves of thought they have set in
motion? Is it improbable that Maurice Hewlett, after listening to some
Anarchist speaker in one of the parks, was inspired to create that fine
anarchistic character “John Senhouse”, in the “Open Country”?

Thousands of such men and women, in the course of years, have
worked persistently and unobtrusively, changing the current of thought
of their time. Like practically all such sincere workers, Harrigan died
miserably poor.